In this case they're implementing Seamless Updates, which should substantially reduce downtime and improve roll-backs during update installation (a major complaint) but instead of focusing on the benefit, they focus on the disk space loss.
The reason it takes up space on Windows, Android, and Chrome OS is that the reserved area holds a chunk of the operating system which is updated in the background before restart. When a restart occurs, the reserved and active slices are swapped (and reversion can be rapidly conducted for failures/roll-backs).
This is a nice quality of life improvement for a common complaint.
if anything, this should be a toggle- if only an opt-out toggle.
fwiw, you can install a linux system including an entire graphical stack with web browser and mail client in that space, twice.
I'm assuming there will be a group policy setting I can change, though, since I'm lucky enough to have Windows 10 Pro...
I think you could fit quite a few raspberry pi's with GUI environments into 7g.
The OEM and MS alliance has been going for some time now. MS promises HW push, and the OEM promise to sell hardware only with Windows. I am surprised they didn't round it up to 10G.
> if anything, this should be a toggle- if only an opt-out toggle.
I agree, but that doesn't help sell PC's.
ZFS snapshots would reduce the space requirements.
Considering that the Surface tablets don't have that much space to begin with, that's a bit of a sacrifice. I also wonder how they will handle this in Azure VMs running Windows, VMs running on developer laptops, etc.
As long as they're staying out of the partition table, this sounds like a good idea to me, honestly.
[1]: https://insider.windows.com/en-us/ih/?contentid=2762bf7a-bef...
At least I would hope they would do something like that, I agree a method which messed with partitions would be a complete show stopper!
Don't forget to also disable auto-updates in Chrome/Firefox, since they are enabled by default.
Forgetting certain settings is annoying. Forgetting that I want to manually control when my computer downloads gigs of data to apply a patch that- in recent times especially- may very well brick my system... well, I can certainly understand where OP's frustration comes in.
Even at one of my jobs a few years back (which was about 50/45/5 apple / windows / linux shop) we were cautioned against applying major updates from apple within the first month or so of their releases given past issues.
- It's configurable.
- The space is reserved for the end user, not the OS manufacturer.
The same applies to downloading large files, etc. I realize that updates are important, but it's even more important that I can actually rely on my computer.
I'm also leaving the computer on for weeks and never had an unexpected reboot with this protocol.
Put me firmly in the camp against removing control from the person sitting at the computer.
Microsoft has a pretty bad track record with their updates breaking stuff and causing data loss. I don't trust them anymore.
Am I wrong that this is an option for all Windows 10 Editions?
